How to Murder Your Husband (Front Street Pictures, Peace Out Productions, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Lifetime’s second January 15 movie, How to Murder Your Husband, was a good deal better than Burned by Love but was still no great shakes, and hardly one of the diamonds in the rough this network has given us before. It starred two old pros, Cybill Shepherd and Steve Guttenberg, as the Brophys, an unhappily married couple in Portland, Oregon. Husband Daniel Brophy (Guttenberg) works teaching cooking classes at the Oregon Culinary Institute and wife Nancy Crampton Brophy (Shepherd) spends her days writing romance/mystery/suspense novels and leading a book club for her and other aspiring writers in this sub-genre. After 27 years of marriage they still have a quite active sex life, but things are not going well for them financially. The Brophys live in an old house which is beginning to deteriorate – even though the location is a prestigious one and they could conceivably get a lot of money if they sold, only the realtor they invite to come look at it tells them they’d have to clear out their back yard. They don’t want to do that because Daniel raises chickens and also grows mushrooms. Nancy’s brother Mark Crampton is dying of cancer, and Mark’s wife, Viet Namese-born Jennifer Crampton (Sandy Minh Abley), rightly suspects that the only reason Nancy is buttering up to them is she’s hoping to grab Mark’s fortune either before or just after he croaks. Nancy also has purchased $1.4 million in insurance on her husband, and there’s a chilling scene reminiscent of Double Indemnity (in fact, the whole movie is reminiscent of Double Indemnity) in which she browbeats Daniel into signing the application for the last policy. The Brophys’ financial straits are symbolized by the cold-water tap on their kitchen sink, which has to be closed with a pair of pliers because the handle has long since been lost.

Amazingly, Nancy has started a blog called “How to Murder YOur Husband,” and we hear voice-overs from her throughout the film supposedly from posts she’s put up on this blog detailing just how she intends to knock her old man off. How to Murder Your Husband is actually based on a true story – the real Nancy Brophy killed her husband Daniel in 2018, shooting him first from behind and then from in front at his place of employment because she’d been told by her insurance agent that she’d get an additional $100,000 if he died at his workplace. And when her brother Mark finally dies, Nancy shows up with a preposterous new will disinheriting his widow Jennifer and leaving all his fortune to Nancy – only the probate judge disallows it and instead accepts Mark’s first will, which left Jennifer his fortune. So Nancy is more determined than ever t turn her husband into cash, only just like the plots of her books,Nancy Brophy’s real-life murder plot turns out to be full of holes. Nancy blames Daniel’s murder on Viet Namese gangsters whom Jennifer supposedly hired to kill both Brophys so Jennifer would get to keep her husband’s fortune after all, but her cover story unravels quickly when the two detectives investigating the case show up at her home and take pictures of her van. They do that to match the side damage on it to what they saw in the surveillance videos they recovered from the crime scene. Also, in order to conceal the fact that she’d actually fired the murder weapon, Nancy (on the advice of her butch-woman gun dealer) had switched out the barrel of her Glock pistol – only she bought the replacement barrel on eBay and, though she deleted her account, it still survived in “the cloud.”

Eventually the rean Nancy Crampton Brophy was tried for her husband’s murder and given a life sentence, though she’s eligible for parole in 25 years – ironically the length of time her insurance agent had told her she’d have to wait to collect the full value of her husband’s life insurance policies if she’d let him die au naturel. Charles actually was disappointed that because it was a true story, writer-director Stephen Tolkin (one of the better Lifetime filmmakers and a specialist in true-crime stories about women criminals) was stuck with Nancy’s real-life guilt and couldn’t do the Seven Keys to Baldpate-style ending he had hoped for, in which Nancy’s husband would be very much alive and the whole story just the plot of Nancy’s latest novel. How to Murder Your Husband was entertaining but didn’t have the depth of some of Lifetime’s other true-crime movies, and the cast was acceptable. There’s a certain degree of old-school professionalism to Cybill Shepherd’s and Steve Guttenberg’s work here, even though it’s sad to watch them as they are now and think back on how not and sexy they were decades earlier – but then none of us are getting any younger, and that includes former movie stars!